Red and green tape block path to recovery

Our restrictive environmental laws need to change, writes Michael Simonetta.

GOVERNMENTS at the state and federal level are currently scrambling to do whatever they can to promote, assist and fund what they are calling “shovel-ready” projects.

This flurry of activity is based on the not unreasonable concern that the economic recovery from COVID-19 will need as much help as it can get lest the economy fall into a deep and prolonged recession.

But governments must also do what they can to remove red and green tape to ensure such projects cannot only proceed but proceed in a timely and cost-effective manner.

This appears to be easier said than done and would require a serious examination and reconsideration of environmental law, such as the Commonwealth’s Environment Protection Biodiversity and Conservation Act. The EPBC act surely stands alone as the most significant obstacle to economic development in Australia.

Its precautionary principle is being used as a reverse onus of proof to stop sustainable and beneficial development. In practice it has captured an (EPBC) Act meant to facilitate wise development while protecting the environment, and turned it into an unwieldy, bureaucratic, ideologically-driven decision-making instrument that places a total emphasis on conservation at the expense of sustainable economic development.

From stopping residential housing developments for first home buyers due to a possible presence of endangered moths, to the sealing of unmade roads to ensure driver safety, the building of dams to provide water resources and economic infrastructure for rural communities and the use of bumblebees to pollinate food crops, the EPBC Act is all pervasive.

Surely it’s time to take stock of our environmental laws and reset the conservation/development pendulum, which, as it stands now, has been skewed too heavily toward conservation at any cost.

Talk by successive governments of cutting green and red tape will continue to ring hollow until the EPBC Act is appropriately amended or, better still, rewritten to recognise the importance of people and development.

The Coalition Government needs to commit to and implement real reform of environmental laws and the way in which they are administered.

The prevailing views of the professional class who are not, and never will be, reliant on shovel-ready projects should not be allowed to jeopardise employment opportunities for those who rely on sustainable economic development.

Michael Simonetta is chair of Australian Fresh Produce Alliance, and chief executive of Perfection Fresh

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